On a recent IRC discussion Pat discussed Slackware's future and the restructuring that will happen for Slackware 11. Regarding the removal of Gnome from Slackware, he said: "GNOME is not easy to build into packages, lacks decent documentation to build, and requires many undocumented system changes for things to work 100%".

Even though I prefer to use GNOME, I applaud Pat for his desire to provide a more focused and cohesive distribution, that is more tightly integrated and more stable. KDE probably does fit better with the vanilla Slackware architecture, and the effort saved in supporting two DE's in one distro can be better spent elsewhere I am sure.

Pat's point about Ubuntu is also a very good one. If you are someone who enjoys using GNOME (like me), there are distributions out there that specialize in providing a great GNOME-based experience (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc).

It takes courage to make decisions like this, and Pat's choice to provide a more focused distro will almost certainly benefit his users in the long run.

One thing I do find silly, is deriding a project like "Dropline GNOME" for "polluting" Slackware with its changes. Alterations like Dropline have their uses, especially now that long time Slack fans who do use GNOME will be running out of options otherwise. If you don't like Dropeline's approach, nobody is forcing you to customize your Slack install by using it. If the itch for Dropline wasn't present in the Slack community, then obviously it would not exist.